ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the transition from Fordism to flexibility with an eye to explaining some of the economic processes associated with postmodernization. It suggests that both Fordism and flexibility are opportunistic responses to crisis tendencies in capitalism. Many theorists of postmodernity have used the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism to describe postmodernization. In producing a "mobilization of the spectacle" post-Fordism creates new, flexible opportunities for consumption. For the regulationists, a "regime of accumulation" is "a macroeconomically coherent phase of capitalist development" that opportunistically emerges within a matrix of class struggle. According to Harvey, Fordism was "a total way of life" that required "Keynesian economic management," as well as "welfare statism" and "control over wage relations". Fordism depended on Keynesian policies to regulate and to maintain "aggregate demand" at a sufficiently high level. Keynesianism hence required public authorities to pursue policies that increased the social wage and invited compromise and cooperation between business and labor.
